corruption – One Rabbit Riot

The more I feel like I should suppress my feelings about something, the more I feel it pressing upon my heart to be bold and talk about it. Can you relate?

I feel like my world has been swirling around me since 2024. Change. Good or bad, I never feel prepared. Leveling up in life, it is rewarding yet sometimes it is more akin to biking up hill and shifting gears downward for the tough pedaling ahead. And I wonder if there are more people feeling this way?

My early thirties have been incredibly rewarding – buying a house, adopting a rabbit, building a garden, successfully sewing pants, etc. But they have also been a sea of shifting sand globally, professionally, and personally.

We all know the public, political bad – the orange fool that has put us all on blast for 2 years. The price of everything, including yarn & fabric has challenged my professional goals because it is so expensive. It zapped my creativity and threw me off my game. I mean, how can I feel inspired to create when neighbors are being kidnapped and put into concentration camps, and our tax dollars are going to fund a war and a genocide. It’s dark. Like where is the joy when that is happening and your “representatives” are trying to silence your right to vote?

I basically took a year off from sewing to regroup, picking up my thimble again this August. I threw my focus into yarn crafts – knitting and crochet, pondering what my plan is going to be to fight for what is right. It’s been humbling to understand that I can help and also this whole situation is systemic, and will be far more difficult to get to the bottom of then I realized. But game on.

AI and the poor economy has been discouraging to my professional goals of becoming a pattern designer. I would like to be a full time, fiber artist, that is bringing in money. But AI has been a one two punch of stealing work and stealing engagement of artists everywhere. It has made creativity feel hopeless, and sharing work online, like I am contributing to a malevolent overlord.

AI and data centers are like a curse dropped into our lives, disrupting what worked and what gave us joy. Now, we have to fight for our water, environment, and creative expression. I know we humans will win this one. I fully believe AI is a fad that will cause a bunch of damage and then collapse – like mining and steel, it is just going to be messy in the present and future.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the personal complexities of marriage, healing from childhood trauma together, and the doom spiral of parents having health issues and also toxic parents dropping in to rock your world. I have felt some days like nothing feels familiar. Some days, this healing journey that Kyle and I are together has feel like a canyon, spreading between us, and we’ll never rejoin on the same road again. It has been so weird.

Why doesn’t anyone prepare you for how hard marriage is? Or how outside forces and generational cycles can seriously fight the strong bond you have with your spouse. I feel like he and I have been in the trenches on one of these outside problems for a decade now, and I just want us to be able to climb out of this together and walk home hand in hand, but people are complicated and so for now, we keep holding on together and waiting for the hard work to be over.

I have never tried so hard across so many different relationships, and tasks (gardening, house responsibilities, social media marketing) to grow and succeed just for things to unravel over and over again. I have felt like I am on a boat that cartoonishly keeps springing leaks, and I am out of limbs and props, to stop the leaks. Some days I wish the cartoon rapids would just appear already so I can sail over the waterfall and smash the boat to bits, because my best efforts feel so futile. I get burnt out and want a change. Because perseverance is exhausting. Choosing to be hopeful and keep going can feel like a cruel joke.

What has shaken me to the core though, and I’m nervous to talk about, is the way the church doesn’t feel like the church to me. My churching friends have become far too comfortable with Christian Nationalism and it is freaking me out. The blind eye to suffering, and the hyper fixation on “sins” that are not sins. I have always found it baffling that the concept of a person in the church getting a divorce, or seeing Catholic believers as “real” Christians is controversial to some people. It’s those kind of opinions that get canonized by the group, that are so destructive.

That’s not even dipping our toes into the sexism, purity culture, and racism that has been alive for centuries. Seeing how normal this is, has been infuriating to me. It has made me feel like I don’t know where I belong anymore. And to be honest, has awoken real life pain of never feeling good enough to be a “good Christian” to some because my parents divorced.

To be clear, I 100% believe in God and that God is good, and that it is the church, the humans, that are taking things to a bad place. I’d like to elaborate more on these reflections in another post, because I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like I am at risk of being sucked into the corruption in these normally “safe” spaces.

It’s not what I thought the church and my christian friends would become. The corruption is running rampant here, and I hate it. But this is not the first, and won’t be the last, because constant sanctification is needed to continually keep our focus on what is important – loving others as God loves us.

I have a ton of stuff to work through, and I am so far from perfect. I just want to open up about things I have been too afraid to open up about because of the highly controlling religious school settings I have found myself in as a kid, and no I did not go to Catholic school, I went to very Calvinist leaning private schools.

So we’ll see if I am brave enough to keep unpacking. I think we all just need to air this stuff out to move forward as the body of Christ in a healthier place, that is not wrapped in a fake cloak of hidden sin and cyclical shame of those who want to talk about the sin being tolerated, because the church in America is fine with teaming up with the political machine and money chasing.

This was a rambling one, but if you stuck through, I appreciate you.

Something I have pondered through this Easter season, thanks to the Bible Project Exodus Way series, is Jesus’ motivation for His mission and how His ministry confronted oppression in the 1st century. Oppression from sin, society, and the corruption of the Jewish leaders, all under foreign occupation. It was a tense atmosphere. That is something I tend to forget. I think that the Pharisees were petty, and Rome was a casual player; instead of Jesus existed in the context of people who wanted to be free.

The Romans were incredibly brutal. If you have watched Gladiator or Gladiator II, there is a temptation to get caught up in the splendors of Rome, but they were a society sustained by oppression. Gladiators were slaves; any immigrants or conquered nations were slaves, there was a strict class divide, and women were not valued. With newborn baby girls and disabled babies being thrown away to animals, off of cliffs, or sold to human traffickers. It was a common practice.

Doesn’t this sound like eugenics and the practices we saw in the extermination plans of genocides? Yep. It’s a cycle of evil and sin that we fall into over and over again. Same ship, different day.

Under Roman occupation, the cross and crucifixion were a common and calculated practice of execution. Men, women, and children could be crucified, usually by the roadside. It was designed to instill fear and was engineered to be a horrific death, and yet Jesus willingly allowed himself to be crucified for us. All of us, His mockers, those scheming against Him, even those Romans.

He came to challenge our understanding of love through the radical expression of it, taking the sin of the entire world – past, present, and future – on His fully human, yet fully God, shoulders – to pay a price we cannot pay for freedom from oppression.

Jesus ministered to everyone in His path, but He sought out those who were abandoned by the society they lived. Jesus healed the sick, the lepers who were kicked out of society and left to live as outcasts, when they needed compassion and care. Those who were disabled were ignored, but Jesus saw them and healed them. He confronted the demons who took up residence inside people and cast the demons out, ending the oppression of their host and restoring peace.

He gave second chances. There were many times throughout His ministry when the disciples and His followers let Him down, yet Jesus forgave them. Even when they denied and abandoned Him, Jesus forgave. Forgiveness confronts the oppression of grudges, vengeance, malice, and bitterness.

Our society is embroiled in grudges, vengeance, and the oppression that comes with unwillingness to forgive. Justice with an iron fist, eye for an eye. That is not what the Bible calls for, even in those Old Testament passages that are brought up to challenge this – the Egyptians were free to join the Passover and be spared from the plague that killed the firstborn, the kingdoms that were in Canaan when the Israelites did it God’s way were conquerered not by violence. God is a just God, a righteous God, and even in the Day of the Lord is not a God of oppression. We are called to forgive, to be reborn in salvation as new creations in Christ, and to give second chances with generosity and love.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen.

And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.
And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”

But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

John 2:13-22 ESV

It’s been a daily struggle for me and the rest of us who have eyes open to the oppression occurring in our midst. I am angry. I want to fight against the pervasive corruption. This Holy Week has been a week of me learning about the El Salvadorian CECOT prison, where there are no second chances ever, hearing that Autism is an “epidemic”, Putin launching missiles during Ukrainian Easter celebrations, and my state’s governor being the target of arson because of his faith.

The ceasefire, which I knew was broken, just fills me with frustration at the ongoing suffering and senseless death. Like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans, the apathy for suffering people and the greed for power and money is the “tale as old as time” plot playing on today. I wish the world would wake up. It’s also the tax deadline here in the United States, and I have to say, I am the least confident I’ve been in my adult life that my taxes are doing anything good for my community.

Especially when social services and disaster relief funding are cut. I want these leaders in my midst, and my fellow citizens who are lukewarm like the church of Laodicea, to stop perpetuating “Christianity” as a form tied up with politics and confront the ways that they are participating in the oppression of others and repent, because this week is about freedom. We are all invited to become a new creation.

True freedom. From who we are, have been, come from, or what we feel we can’t be. It is a transformative second chance of mercy and justice that we have not earned, but is freely given. No corruption or cronyism can take it away, nor can violence or tyranny.

If you are reading this and haven’t experienced this kind of freedom, may I recommend the Chosen, the Bible Project, and the gospel of John first? John is so thematic, and it’s a story that will pull you in. The world is a vampire, but there is hope. Stay strong, friends, and know that you are loved.

Tag: corruption

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